Lauren Mayer: Cherry-Picking The Bible

By Lauren Mayer, on Wed May 6, 2015 at 6:34 PM ET

The latest arguments against marriage equality remind me of a scene from the Mel Brooks’ classic “Blazing Saddles,” where Sherriff Bart is trying to keep the citizens of Rock Ridge from caving into Hedly Lamarr’s efforts to get them to leave and says, “Can’t you see this is the last act of a desperate man?” Howard Johnson’s response is, “We don’t care if it’s the first act of Henry V, we’re leaving!” The tide has turned so quickly and definitively, opponents of same-sex marriage are running out of usable tactics. “This is how marriage has been for millenia” is easily countered by the fact that for most of those millenia, marriage involved men owning women, and “It will hurt traditional marriage” doesn’t hold up against the evidence from all the states where marriage equality hasn’t produced higher divorce rates, polygamy, or people marrying their pets.

Some opponents cite Biblical passages (as though the Bible were in fact the US Constitution), but even those arguments only expose more hypocrisy, given that they ignore all sorts of other Biblical edicts. (The one on ‘gluttonous children should be put to death’ sure raised my eyebrows when I heard about it in Hebrew School. Fortunately, even the most observant Jews let that one slip . . . ) So here’s a musical response, in the hopes that gospel-style music might help marriage equality opponents finally see the light: